Modern weights and measurements on wild tigers

[GuateGojira]

(02-17-2022, 04:33 AM)LoveAnimals Wrote: A WILD contemporary amur tiger of almost 600 lb? If that's true, that'd be even larger than the largest confirmed historical amur tiger of 254 kg. And, meanwhile we haven't seen any reliable 280-290+ kg male from siberia (which is the case for Bengal tigers regarding reliable hunting records only) finding a 270 kg tiger in these days from a population that had a drastic downsize  because of poaching would be astonishing.

But yea, for confirming such record we need solid evidence, that's so bad that  they didn’t reply to you. Hope it's not just an exagerration or a visual off estimate

We need to be very carefull with these reports. Belive me, it happened to me, twice! The first time was when a scientific magazine (yes, a per review one) mentioned that one Amur tiger weighed 220 kg, but when I contacted Dr Goodrich directly he confirmed that the male was just 200 kg. The second was a male in a veterinary webpage that said that weighed 250 kg (sic!) but when I contacted the main veterinary it resulted than that particular male weighed only 182 kg!!!

So, with this apparent tiger of 270 kg in the Amur-Ussuri region, I will like a hard confirmation before to accept it. However, that doesn't mean that old Amur tigers did not reached those sizes in the past.

Now, there is a point that I wanted to share with all of you, about the heaviest Amur tiger in old records. We know that the heaviest male tiger from the Amur region, accepted by Slagth et al. (2005) was the male of 254 kg. However there was another male that could be heaver and that was discarded for an unfair reason.

I am talking about one male of 250 kg reported by Baikov in 1927. If we check the paper of Slaght and team, they say that the information is accurate as is from a first hand source and based in Heptern & Sludskii (1992) it even had body measurements. So why this particular weight was discarded? Check it:

*This image is copyright of its original author

*This image is copyright of its original author

*This image is copyright of its original author

So the weight was discarded becasuse it excludes its viceras, it was "clean". The point of Slaght and team is that we can't know the real weight and that is fair, but we still can calculate it. For example, from the two male tigers reported by Goodwin and Morden (different papers) shows the difference between an intact and a "clean" (with no vicera on it) tiger. The first male weighed 249.5 kg intact and 230 kg "clean". The second male weighed 217.7 kg intact and 200 kg "clean". The tigress of 167 kg was just reported by Goodwin, wich published the weights "clean" so Slaght used only the weights intanct reported by Morden and discarded the figures of Goodwin, including that tigress, that based in Mazák, I decided to include.

In this case, we can see that the vicera weighed between 18 - 20 kg. So, the male of 250 kg that was "clean" could had a weight of about 268 - 270 kg. That means that if intact, this male was as big as the biggest Bengal tigers reported by Scientists. In this case, we can see, again, that the largest Amur tigers were as big as the biggest Bengal tigers in the past, something that had its backup in the skulls, wich is about 380 mm in both populations (scientific maximum) and up to 406 mm (hunting maximum).

I decided to include the figure of 250 kg, as represent a reliable figure and from a primary source, and about the vicerae, we can take it like an "empty belly" specimen. This is the same that I done with the tigress of 167 kg, which is from a first hand source and with body measurements.

That is why the average weight of the Amur tigers "weighted" is of 200 kg, including modern and old records. First hand records are priority, even if they are "evicerated". Reply